Bobbie Ann Mason and Philip Roth: Two Great-American-Novel Concepts Pieced in One Big Picture

My purpose in this essay is to place Philip Roth's American Pastoral in a context broader than that of the urban New Jersey milieu for which he is generally known. By contrasting this work with the two major novels of Bobbie Ann Mason, I weave together Roth's delineation of the rise and fall of the industrial northeast with Mason's saga of a similar period in the rural agricultural mid-south. In this way a total picture emerges of America's rise and decline in the period of the twentieth century through the aftermath of the Vietnam War—with some surprising similarities.